


Ora Pro Nobis

by bomberqueen17



Series: Now And At The Hour Of Our Death [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 616 to MCU fix-it, Black Widow - Freeform, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, F/M, Memory Issues, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Self-Discovery, TW: Self Harm, buckynat - Freeform, liho - Freeform, stick and poke tattoos, winter soldier - Freeform, winter widow - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-18
Packaged: 2018-03-18 07:42:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3561698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I almost,” he stuttered, “I forgot— I keep thinking you are her. I— I’m sorry.” He folded his arm across his midsection, stumbled a couple of paces, leaned against the car’s trunk. She thought, for a wild moment, he might cry.<br/>“You loved her,” Natasha said wonderingly. She had been envisioning— she didn’t know what she had been envisioning— but this, it clearly went beyond that, for him.<br/>His shoulders shook— both of them— and then he went still. After a long moment he breathed in, then out. Finally he looked back at her, face blank. “How could I not?” he asked.<br/>It was such a perfectly astonishing answer that she stared at him without speaking until he turned away and walked into the rest stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Liho made a strange little squeaking noise, and Natasha woke, keeping still and slitting her eyes. That damn cat. 

Somewhere, there was a quiet thumping noise as Liho jumped down from the bed, where Natasha most certainly had _not_ given her permission to sleep. There was a quiet pattering, footsteps, and then Liho squeaked again, a little _mrrrup?_ of inquisitive friendliness. 

Natasha slanted her gaze far enough to see the clock. Three in the morning. Of course. 

Wait.

What would a cat be greeting at three in the morning, in a locked apartment?

“Prrrr,” Liho said, “prrup, mew?”

She was talking to someone. Natasha knew her sounds, now. She hadn’t had pets before now, but she knew how animals behaved. 

She slipped soundlessly out of bed, catching up the pistol she kept on the floor under the nightstand, and raised her head slowly, keeping to the shadows, peering out through the bedroom door along the excellent sightlines into the kitchen hallway. 

“Mew,” Liho said, sounding satisfied, and suddenly began to purr. There-- a shadow. Someone-- seriously? Someone adult-male-human-sized was crouching to pet her, next to the kitchen table. Who broke into an apartment and petted the fucking cat? 

Natasha crept around the bed and slid along the wall to peer out into the hallway again. She couldn’t see him directly but she could hear Liho purring. 

“What’s the cat’s name, Natalia?” a man said, soft and hoarse, in Russian, voice warm with amusement. “He’s very sweet.”

She couldn’t identify the voice. It was familiar, oddly accented, but she couldn’t place it. She didn’t answer, suspending her breathing. Familiar but no one she remembered was _not_ a good sign.

“That’s a good kitty,” the man said, then said a few syllables of American-accented babytalk. “Puss-puss, whisker baby, aren’t you sweet. Oh yes.” His voice trailed off into a soft murmur. Natasha slid along the wall until she could see him, still crouched in the hallway, looking utterly unwary as he petted Liho, who was unashamedly rubbing her face on his hand until she nearly fell over. “Oh yes, that’s a rumble-puss.” His English was less accented than his Russian, more natural. 

She stepped out into the hallway, soundlessly easing into a shadow, and leveled the pistol at him. Though she made no sound, he tilted his face up to look at her, and smiled. He had no visible weapon in either hand, and didn’t stop petting the cat. 

“Natalia,” he said, smiling. 

“What do you want?” she asked. 

The smile slipped a little. He was white, dark-haired, even-featured, with wide-set eyes and a full mouth, a strong but not jutting jaw, not much more than thirty. “Nat,” he said, “it’s me. It’s James.” He didn’t seem frightened of the gun so much as merely concerned that she didn’t recognize him. The only reason she didn’t shoot him right then and there was that there was no trace of satisfaction at seeing her fear, no hint of pleasure at knowing something she didn’t: none of the Department X warning signs.

“James who,” she said. 

His hand stilled, and Liho made an annoyed noise, turning to rub against his fingers. “James,” he said, softly. “You-- your James.” His face had gone blank, wide-eyed, and he breathed out slowly, staring at her. 

“I don’t know a James,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to sneak up on me in the middle of the night.”

His broad shoulders pulled inward a little, and he looked tired. “I should have expected they’d take me out of your memory,” he said. “But I thought maybe--” He made a face, pressing his lips together. “I got a lot of it back. I got the memories-- a lot of them-- what they took. I thought. Natalia--” 

“Who are you,” she said. “That you say these things-- who are you? Who sent you?”

“No one sent me,” he said, and he looked down at Liho, smoothing his hand down her back. He gave her a pat on her rump and pushed to his feet, holding his hands out to his sides, palms forward. 

The fingers of the left one caught a glint of light from the window, as if reflecting on a metal surf-- _holy shit_. Natasha took a step back, eyes wider, finger slipping inside the trigger guard. 

“Winter Soldier,” she said. “You-- I know who you are.”

“Don’t,” he said, eyebrows pulling together in, what, distress? “Don’t-- Natalia, that’s not-- that’s not who I am.”

“Have you come here to have an identity crisis at me?” she said, managing to sound coolly amused, though her heart was beating so hard he could probably hear it. 

He gazed at her, impassive, maybe a little sad, and said, “No, Natalia. I know who I am. And I know who you are. It comes back, their wipes are not nearly as good as they assumed.”

“You’ve shot me twice,” she said, but he had never spoken to her, not either time. She hadn’t known what his face looked like. He had never had a name. 

But this was him, clearly-- he was wearing civilian clothes, heavy boots, a dark jacket, and the black half-glove on his left hand did nothing to conceal his metal fingers. He had the same build, the same posture, down even to the dark hair. It was the same man. 

Liho twined around his feet, whining in annoyance, and it broke through his stricken expression long enough for him to glance down, not moving his hands. “Your cat,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Her. Liho,” she said, despite herself, but did not remove her finger from the trigger. “I ask you again, why have you come here?” 

He kept his gaze focused down, at the cat. “There was a time when we knew one another,” he said. “As people. It is a long time since I was allowed any coherent sense of myself.” His Russian was old-fashioned, strangely precise, and contrasted with the gibberish English he’d been using on the cat. “But when I-- my handlers did not retrieve me. I escaped them. And without the drugs, without the chair-- I remember you, Natalia. I remember--” He looked up, and must have caught something in her expression, or her lack of expression, and he stopped, biting his lip. “But you don’t remember me.”

“I remember you,” she said. “I remember that I met you, I remember that I was told stories about you. I remember that you hunted me, in Odessa. I remember that you hunted me in D.C. I have read your files and I know who you are and what was done to you.”

“But you don’t remember me,” he said. 

She stared at him. “What else is there for me to remember?”

He swallowed hard, and looked down at the cat. “We,” he said. “We knew each other, Natalia.”

It didn’t take a lot of knowledge of humans to extrapolate that. “You mean we fucked,” she said, deliberately coarse. 

He looked up, bristling a little. “Not like that,” he said, defensive. “Not-- I wasn’t your mission, or anything like that. It wasn’t like that.”

“I don’t do that sort of thing for fun,” she said, and maybe it was a little more bitter than she’d intended to sound.

“Neither did I,” he said. “It was,” and he sank slowly back down, scooping the cat up and cradling her against his left shoulder, petting her with his right hand as he stood up again, looking at her rather than at Natasha. “I got most of the memories back from, from whole decades, Natalia, and you were the only thing I-- you’re all I remember that wasn’t awful.” He glanced up at her, and she clamped down internally with everything she had against the odd sense of deja vu, the strange stirring in her chest at the sad expression he was wearing. In the dark, she couldn’t see color, but she suddenly knew that his eyes were a pale blue. 

It was the power of suggestion. She’d done it herself, used it in her favor. “I have read your file,” she said. “I am aware of what sort of things were done to you. And by you.”

Liho was purring, rubbing utterly shamelessly against his face. She was normally not so affectionate. And suddenly Natasha was just too tired to point the gun at him. 

“Don’t steal my cat,” she said, flicking the safety back on as she lowered the weapon. 

“I like cats,” the Winter Soldier said, smiling softly at Liho as he scratched in just the right spot under her chin. “I remember that too.” 

“Who is hunting you?” she asked. 

He looked up from Liho, wary. “Will you help me?” he asked. “Even if you do not remember me?”

“I know who you are to Steve,” she said, “and he is my friend. I will help you.”

He nodded, looking down and away again. “HYDRA wants me back,” he said, “and thinks they can get me, but they do not know where I am now. I would not lead them down on you, Natalia.”

“Everyone calls me Natasha,” she said quietly. 

“Natasha,” he echoed. 

“I am going to put on a bathrobe,” she said, resigning herself. She never slept naked, but her sleep shirt barely covered her ass, and she had no bra and the shirt was almost translucent.

“I will stay here with Liho,” the Winter Soldier said. She turned her back on him, watching the shadows along the wall, but he did not move. When she came back, he was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his legs criss-crossed and the cat cradled blissfully in his lap. Liho was letting him pet her belly, which was unfair, she had clawed Natasha for taking her up on that offer before. 

“That cat is a whore,” Natasha said, affecting disgust. Clint came over sometimes, and always devoted a truly silly amount of effort to trying to get Liho to like him. He’d be jealous when she told him about this. If she did.

The Winter Soldier looked up, grinning-- he was very, very good-looking, arrestingly so. “Nah,” he said, switching to English. “She’s just got good taste.” 

Natasha rolled her eyes. She had her gun in a shoulder holster under her bathrobe, and knives at each calf and one at her left wrist, and she wondered why she felt like that was more than enough. He’d shot her twice. He certainly had sleeper programming; even if he were utterly convinced he had come here to do her no harm, it was perfectly likely he’d stumble on a trigger and burn down the building with her in it, or something. 

“Do you drink coffee?” she asked. 

“Yes,” he said, and pushed to his feet, balancing Liho carefully. 

Liho wasn’t a lap cat, but she stayed in his arms, purring obnoxiously, as he settled at the kitchen table. He was injured, Natasha noted, moving hesitantly-- somewhere in the body, probably cracked ribs. Not injured enough to slow him down in the short-term. But he was also underweight, she judged, and she’d bet he wasn’t sleeping. 

She didn’t know him well enough to know that. It was ridiculous to think she did. 

But she remembered her own first shaky months on her own, shaking off the drugs and the programming and the fundamental certainty of being observed. 

“What have you been eating?” she asked, as the coffee brewed. He didn’t ask to see her make it, but she made a point of making it where he could see, and setting the coffee canister on the table near him. It wasn’t implausible that she would do so normally, her kitchen being shaped as it was, but he seemed to take no interest, and she judged he genuinely didn’t care what she put into the coffee. He looked exhausted.

Maybe she was projecting. Her own transition had not been smooth, and her period of servitude had been much shorter than his. 

“Whatever I can get,” he said. She’d switched to English, and he’d followed. Liho got up on her hind paws and swiped her face against his, and he huffed a soft laugh. “Not cats. I haven’t been eating cats, silly puss.”

“She’s not _that_ affectionate a cat,” Natasha observed, pausing to watch. She had plain wheat bread. She didn’t know how his digestion would be, how far along he was in his detoxing. She put a couple of slices into the toaster and pressed the button; if he didn’t eat it, she would. “I don’t know why she’s so excited to see you.”

“Maybe she knew me in a past life,” the Winter Soldier said, and it surely wasn’t projecting to think he sounded a little mournful. 

It was certainly projecting, however, to feel a tug at her heartstrings over it. It wasn’t her fault he had her confused with someone else.

“Does Steve know where you are?” Natasha asked. 

He looked up from Liho’s blissful face, eyes wary. “No,” he said. 

“You know he’s desperate to find you,” Natasha said. “You know he blames himself for everything that has happened to you.”

“I know,” the Soldier said, and looked back down at Liho. “And I wish I could ease his mind but I can’t.”

“Is it his fault?” Natasha asked, raising an eyebrow, and he studied her face obliquely for a moment, under his lashes. He had thick dark lashes, his eyes the exact, stunning shade of pale blue she’d expected, and a wide square jaw, cleft chin, lush red mouth— he was very pretty, and very distinctive, and she would have remembered him if she’d met him and any sense of familiarity she had of him was solely due to finding him attractive, surely.

“That’s not something I care about,” the Soldier said. “Assigning blame is pointless. All I have time to be concerned with is preventing any of it from happening again.”

“And you don’t think Steve will keep you safe,” Natasha said. 

The Soldier dug his fingers in behind Liho’s ear, and the cat’s purrs rose to a volume that could have rattled china. “He can’t,” the Soldier said quietly. “He works for the same people who I just escaped. Even if he means to keep everything aboveboard-- they’re re-forming SHIELD, it’s going to be exactly the same as it was.” He glanced up and met her gaze, squinting a little in weary resignation.

Natasha thought of defending them, of defending those of her old comrades-in-arms who hadn’t proven false, but she couldn’t even come up with words. She didn’t trust the new SHIELD either. She’d never recover from finding out she’d been working for HYDRA all along. How could she expect him to? 

“I suppose I can’t disagree with you,” she sighed.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said, “I don’t know where there’s a place for me in this world, on my own, but I’m not going back to that, I’m not going to let myself be used again.”

“Fair,” she said quietly.

“Steve can look after himself now,” the Soldier said, “can mind his business-- he has people now who can watch his back.” A shiver, near-imperceptible, went through his shoulders. “I know I can’t,” he went on, very quietly. 

“Steve is in good hands, mostly,” Natasha said. “He’s just-- he’s busy looking for you.”

“What would he do if he found me?” The Soldier fixed her with a flat stare. “Any government agency would be insane not to confine me, to deprogram me, to make sure I’m not dangerous. And I-- I can’t. So-- I can’t make Steve--” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “I can’t either make Steve be the one to do that to me, or make him stake his entire reputation on defending me. Make him go outlaw or something-- he probably would, for me, and I don’t want that.”

Natasha considered that. “He would,” she said. It would be a mess. She looked over at him. “So you came to me instead.”

He flinched, inexplicably, and looked down at Liho, who had settled into his lap with her paws in the air. He stroked her chest gently, working his fingertips down through her thick fur. “Yes,” he said, his voice no more than a breath. 

“You thought I would remember you,” Natasha said. 

He nodded without looking up. “I remembered you so quickly,” he said, “I thought-- and I didn’t think they had wiped you so often, so it never-- I never thought they’d take me out of your head.”

She didn’t argue, just stood and went to the counter. “So you want my help,” she said. 

His shoulders went rigid, and his hand stilled for a moment. Liho squeaked and he resumed petting her. “No,” he said, “I can’t. Not if you don’t remember me. I can’t ask for that.”

“Who else can you go to?” she asked, putting another two slices of bread into the toaster and buttering the two that had popped up. She slid the plate onto the table in front of him, and refilled his coffee cup again. 

He looked intently— longingly?— at the toast, then back up at her as she sat back down across from him. His eyelashes were dark and heavy, casting shadows down his cheeks. “No one,” he said. 

“You could go to Steve,” she said. 

“I know I can’t,” he said. “I’ll die alone before I drag him with me.”  
“He’d burn the world down for you,” Natasha said. 

“I think enough of the world has been burned down,” the Soldier said. “I don’t need any more fires set on my account. Rebuilding will be complicated enough without me compromising Captain America.”

“Well,” Natasha said, “like it or not, he is compromised, and he’s not doing any rebuilding, he’s running around hunting you.”

The Soldier sighed. He was sort of staring at the toast, but not eating it. “I can’t help that,” he said. “I can’t-- there’s nothing I can do about that. If I contact him he’ll come after me even more determinedly.” 

“I made that toast for you,” Natasha said. “And the next batch is coming up in a moment. You should eat.”

He bit his lip, and glanced up at her again. “Thanks,” he said, and stopped petting Liho to pick up the toast with his right hand. His left was wrapped around the seat of the chair, close to his body, and he had used it for almost nothing the entire time she’d seen him. No fine work, anyway-- and that wasn’t right, she knew it was capable. 

Liho complained, and rolled over in his lap. “The entire time I have had that cat I do not believe she has rolled over for me like that,” Natasha said. It wasn’t quite true, but almost. The Soldier smiled to himself, a wistful sad sort of smile, and shoved the toast into his mouth to free his hand to pet her again.

“I can’t stay much longer,” he said, after he’d swallowed. “I won’t bring them down on you, so I have to keep moving.” He picked the toast back up.

“How are they following you?” she asked, timing it for just after he’d taken a bite to see if he’d talk with his mouth full. 

He grimaced, chewed, and said, muffled, “Trackers,” then swallowed a bit painfully, clearly not having chewed enough. Somehow she’d known he’d do that, and from his slightly-exasperated grimace, he’d expected her timing. It was eerie. “I have embedded trackers I can’t get out. I know they track them but they’re too afraid of me to follow closely. And they’re too understaffed to check anywhere I don’t stay long. They might swing by this neighborhood but they won’t know where to look like I did.”

“How did you know where to look?” she asked. 

He half-smiled, and took another bite of toast before answering. “Well,” he said, “Natalia had a particular affection for brick, and casement windows, among other things.” 

“Why do you call me Natalia?” Natasha asked, trying not to bristle. 

“I don’t,” he said. “The woman with whom I must have you confused-- when I met her she was of an age where she was tired of nicknames, and it pleased her to be called by her full name, and it became a joke between the two of us.” 

“She was a child,” Natasha said, drawing a conclusion. She’d had a few handlers who’d been… in retrospect, inappropriate. It figured they might have erased more of the same memories.

The Soldier shook his head. “At first,” he said. “When I met her. But she aged, and I did not; I was in stasis through most of her adolescence. I did not enter a relationship with her until she was nearly twenty, and I could not have been more than 26 or so.” He shrugged. “I understand your concern. If your childhood was like hers then you had plenty of men— and women— in it with no such scruples.”

That should not have mollified her, but it did, and she concealed her discomfort by retrieving the next set of toast. “Would you like peanut butter?” she asked. “I have peanut butter.”

He looked up. “I,” he said, hesitating, then said, “please,” and finished the toast in front of him.

“I have other food,” she said, “if you’d rather.”

“No,” he said, “thank you, truly, but-- I can’t stay, not here.”

“Do you know where the trackers are?” she asked. 

He nodded. “I removed the ones I could reach,” he said, “but there are three more. They will require surgery that I cannot perform on myself. Apart from the risk of physical injury, they’re simply in places I can’t reach.”

“Where?” she asked. 

“One in the metal shoulderblade,” he said, “one between the ribs under my right arm, underneath the lateral muscle, and one embedded in the bone at the back of my pelvis on the left side.” 

“I will look,” she said. “If I cannot remove them I know someone who can, and who would not betray us.”

He looked up at her, studying her face. “Why would you help me?” he asked. 

She considered it. “You came to me for help, did you not?”

His mouth twisted. “When I thought I knew you,” he said, “and you me. If you are not who I thought, then you have no incentive to help me.”

She shrugged, and set the plate of toast on the table. Peanut butter had protein, and he looked like he needed the nutrition. “Whether I know you personally or not,” she said, “I know who you are and I know what’s been done to you. Your enemies are my enemies, and you have done much of the work of destroying them that I was not looking forward to. I would repay you for that by helping you.” 

He didn’t look convinced, quite, but he ate the first piece of toast.

“And,” she added, after a moment, mustering her resolve-- she was turning over a new leaf, she wasn’t going to be so closed-off, she was going to admit to having human emotions-- “Steve Rogers is a close personal friend of mine, and I know he wants very badly to know that you are all right.” 

The Soldier’s posture tightened, uneasy, and she held up her hand. “I will not lead him to you,” she said, “but if I can later tell him that I helped you, I know that will please him.” She tilted her head. “And it is not just that I owe him, but that I like him. He is one of few people I would call a friend.”

The Soldier fidgeted nervously, then crammed the second piece of toast into his mouth. “Is he okay,” he asked finally, looking fixedly down. 

“Steve?” She shrugged. “He’s had some trouble adjusting to the modern world. He’s very upset about what happened to you.”

“You know who I am,” the Soldier said.  “I mean, all of it.”

“Yes,” she said. 

“So you know it is complicated,” he said. “You know— what I’m— I am.”

“I do,” she said. “I know what kind of conditioning they have done to you, I know what they started with. I do not know what you’ve gotten back, as that seems to vary by subject.” She made a self-deprecating little gesture. “But you— you’re working on your own now, and that’s important.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. That’s— yes.”

She thought for a moment, looking at his awkward and anxious expression. “So I suppose this is belated,” she said quietly, “but what do you call yourself?”

He blinked at her, looking stricken, then looked down and away. “I, I don’t,” he admitted quietly. “It’s, it’s been a long time and I don’t—“ He trailed off, and she let him work through it on his own. She put another couple of pieces of bread into the toaster. She was going to eat these, because there wouldn’t be any more sleep for her tonight.

“Natalia called me James,” he said finally, nearly whispering. “It was— it was the only name I knew I’d had, for a long time.”

“James,” she said, and watched as a shiver ran through his shoulders— well, just the one, the other one was solid like a rock. He settled, and she watched him a moment longer. “Painful?”

“No,” he said, and he was lying, it certainly pained him to hear it. But she knew what it was like to want to feel things. “No, I— please.”

“I will call you what you want me to,” she said. The toaster popped and she spread peanut butter carefully on both slices, and sat at the table across from— well, from James. 

“I should return that favor,” he said, and closed his eyes briefly and bit his lip before flicking a glance at her. “Natasha,” he added, and it sounded right, and she nodded. 

He sat in silence a few moments, petting Liho, who had fallen asleep but was still purring audibly in his lap. Superstitious people said animals were good judges of character. Natalia knew that wasn’t it, but that animals often picked up on body language and pheromones and the like that humans missed. She couldn’t begin to guess what Liho saw in the— in James, but it may have been as simple as that he seemed to know how to pet a cat. 

Either the Winter Soldier had been sent on missions involving cats, or James Barnes had been a cat person.

“I can’t stay longer,” he said finally, visibly trying to collect himself. He looked achingly exhausted. “It takes them forty-five minutes to get an approximate fix on me, and if I stay longer than an hour or so, they may bother to send someone.”

“How do you sleep?” Natasha asked, pushing to her feet. 

He shrugged, and did not answer. “If I am in a place I do not care about compromising,” he said, after a moment, “I will chance it. They do not always send someone, and those they do send are not often good enough for the task.” He slanted a look sidelong at her. “It is not normally an issue.”

 _He doesn’t sleep,_ she thought, suspicion confirmed. That wouldn’t help his recovery, though he seemed to be doing fairly well for all that. “Who broke your ribs?”

“Not broken,” he said. “I did, I fell. I am heavier than I realize.” He shrugged again. “They are nearly healed.” That was certainly a lie. 

“I have a contact,” she said, “a medic, who owes me favors— she can remove the trackers.”

“At least one will have some kind of alarm,” the— James— said, frowning. “They will know that it has been removed.”

“So we will figure out which it is, and disable that one so it seems like you broke it, then carry the others, send them off somewhere as if they were still embedded.”

James considered that. “That might work,” he said. “That—“ He cut himself off, and looked up at her. “Why would you help me?” he demanded. 

“James,” she said, “I hate them too. And I can do this to hurt them. I would do this even if I did not like you, instead of just not knowing you.”

Saying his name was playing dirty; she could see it affect him, could see it pull at him. He looked at her for a long moment, swaying visibly toward her, then set his jaw. “I can’t,” he said. “It wouldn’t be that easy.”

She nodded. “Let me take scans,” she said. “I will find out more, find out which trackers have the alarms, how hard they would be to remove.”

“I can’t stay even that long,” he said. He stood, setting Liho down on the chair; she complained, and rolled over with a squeak, but settled where he’d left her. “I have to go now.”

Natasha nodded. “Come to me again and I will help you,” she said. “But maybe knock. I can’t promise I won’t shoot if you startle me.”

A faint shadow of a smile flitted across his features. “I’ll try,” he said.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw, mention of self-harm, cutting, alcohol

 

Voyages of self-discovery, Natasha decided, were fucking _obnoxious_. She stalked gracefully away from the cab, towing her rolling suitcase that was largely camouflage and unsuccessfully trying not to resent it as it bumped up the steps. Fucking normal people. Fucking expectations. Fucking— doing things correctly— like a normal person— 

She unlocked the building’s door with savage force, head aching from how her teeth gritted, her whole spine screaming with tension. Her muscles had locked up from the bruising. This encounter had not gone all that well. 

It could have been worse, though. Her enemies had been afraid, had not dared to commit to attacking her. There had been gaps in their ranks. It had taken her some time to corner one long enough to beat any intel out of him, but his gasping plea— “Not the Soldier! Don’t turn me over to the Winter Soldier!”— had been very illuminating.

They thought she was working with him. 

And they were absolutely terrified of him.

She’d managed to blend in at another installation, long enough to overhear dribs and drabs of gossip, and to plant her bugs and worms. She’d learned many things, not least of which that the belief that she and the Soldier were collaborating was widespread and unquestioned. There were a lot of tantalizing hints. “It only makes sense,” one gossip had said. “Given their history.”

But nobody had explained what their history _was_.

 

Liho didn’t greet her at the door. Normally the cat heard her coming up the stairs, but today there was no response. She dumped her suitcase on the bed, by habit scanning for any sign of intruders, but no one had touched any of her lightswitches, left footprints on her floor, or tampered with any of her appliances. 

“I was only gone a week and a half,” Natasha grumbled aloud to herself. Where had the cat got to? She’d had the downstairs neighbor stop by to feed and pet her. There was the note she’d left, on the counter; there in the recycling bin was the correct number of cans. Annoyed, Natasha went into the kitchen. But she couldn’t settle down with the glass of wine she’d promised herself. Not until she figured out where the fucking cat had gone. 

It only made sense that the downstairs neighbor must have taken her in; maybe she was letting her spend the nights there, if her husband was away. Liho would enjoy that. That was probably it.

Natasha stood perfectly still for a long moment, looking at her phone, but there wasn’t anything on it to check; she was listening, and smelling. The air in the apartment smelled like the outdoors, subtly. A door or window had been open recently. Perhaps the neighbor had opened the window, and Liho had gotten out, but why would she do that?

A tingle went up the back of Natasha’s neck, and she picked up the bottle of wine and two glasses, dangling them by the stems between her fingers as she walked into the bedroom and opened the window. This window was the one that had been opened, surely. She climbed out of it onto the fire escape, and was not in the least bit surprised to see, at the darker end, a heavier shadow curled at the base of the railing, with a tiny black purring shadow in its lap and a glint of metal on its left side. 

“James,” she said. “Are you stealing my cat?”

“Never,” he said, his mouth curving in the shadows into a shape that was almost a smile. His voice sounded like he hadn’t spoken to anyone since he’d last seen her. 

She unscrewed the cap of the wine— it did no good to be a snob about such things, a lot of good ones came in screw tops now— and poured both glasses half full, handing one to him. He took it with his right hand. “You’ve been stealing my targets, though,” she said. 

“Have I?” He settled back against the railing. As her eyes adjusted to the dark she could see him better, could see how pale and tired he looked. There was a shadow along one cheek, either a bruise or a smudge of dirt. Liho squeaked and stood up, picking her way delicately out of his lap and coming toward Natasha. Natasha sat down and let her climb into her lap. 

“Hello, kitten,” Natasha said, scratching Liho’s ears, her shoulders, down her back, the base of her tail. Liho squeaked and curled herself around, kneading at Natasha’s leg. “Yes, James. Everywhere I went, I saw your footprints. I had a man beg me not to turn him over to you.”

James shrugged. “I suppose we have the same enemies,” he said. 

“They think we are working together,” she said. 

He looked up from his wineglass. “We could,” he said after a long moment. “It’s a good combination of skill-sets for wetwork. I do distance, you do close-up. I do surveillance, you spy directly.”

“I still don’t remember you,” she said, because it had to be said. “I don’t remember ever working with you before.”

He would be hard to read, if she didn’t somehow know his body language. That slight pulling-back of his human shoulder, the dip of his chin; that had hurt him. He shrugged nonchalantly, and it struck her as false. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve researched enough to know that even if you are not Natalia, your training is pretty much the same.” 

“Would you just swap me in for her?” Natasha asked. 

“No,” he answered, deliberate and unhurried; she hadn’t upset him with that one. Not enough for him to react uncontrolledly. “I wouldn’t be that stupid. One thing I know bone-deep is not to underestimate a Black Widow.”

The moon was setting, its light sliding silvery across the fire escape. It would reach him in a few minutes; just now, it was illuminating her, and she could turn her head and see the moon, three-quarters full and waning, riding low in the sky amid shreds of clouds. “You’ve known so many of us,” she said. 

“I have,” he answered. “Much of it is excised from my files. But the memories have returned, fragments of them, enough to know.”

“They erased your memories,” she said. He inclined his head slightly, and took a sip of the wine. 

“Yours too,” he said. 

“I hadn’t thought so,” she said. “Not— not all. Not so many, not like you.” She swirled the wine around in the glass. “James, I— I did the math. There isn’t time for there to have been anything between us. Not like you made it sound. I’m just— not missing enough time.”

“And it was too long ago,” James said. “She’s not you. You’re not her.” He took a drink; he’d nearly finished the wine in the glass. 

“I can’t be,” she agreed. But it sat wrong. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if I weren’t confused. I suppose it’s no surprise, that I’d still be confused about things.”

“Have you had a bad time of it?” she asked. 

He leaned forward a little out of the shadow, and pushed up his right sleeve by rubbing his forearm against his leg. The sleeve tugged up and revealed pale skin in the moonlight, and dark ink scrawled across it, fading. Words. Russian characters, numerals. One set of characters was different, dimensional, and she leaned in a little— it was a scab, it was carved into the skin as if with a knife, and it said “STEVE” and was underlined. 

With some horror she realized that much of the other writing wasn’t marker, either; it was ink forced under the skin. It was still fading out as if it were on the surface, but there were scabs and dried blood and generally, it was a mess. 

“Marker washes off too fast,” he said. “Three, four days, it’s gone. If I drive the ink in with needles it stays two, three weeks, long enough for me to write it again before I forget. I have to write notes, mnemonics. I saw a movie about it and thought it was a good idea.”

“What movie,” Natasha said, blank.

“Don’t remember,” James said, with a bitter ripple of laughter in his voice. “I’m a wreck, though. I’m getting it all back but it’s like one of those puzzles with thousands of pieces, and I can’t figure out how it all goes together. And there’s this great clear section with Natalia, but I can’t figure out how it connects to anything else.” He leaned back, rubbing his arm against his bent leg to pull the sleeve back down, and finished the wine in his glass. She held out the bottle and poured him another glass when he extended it out to accept the offering.

“Do you need anything to eat?” she asked quietly. He shook his head, and sat back. Liho climbed down and went back to him, standing up to plant a paw in his chest and pat at his face. He made a kissy face at her, and put his wineglass down to pet her. She rubbed her face against his, and he laughed quietly, an actual laugh. 

“She really likes you,” Natasha said. 

“I’ve always liked cats,” James said. “They’ve always made sense to me.”

“Did you have pet cats?” she asked. That was the thing that had struck her, reading through his file; yes, he’d been through many things like those she had, but he’d had a childhood. 

“No,” James answered. “My father hated them, and Steve was allergic I think. But a lot of people I knew had them. My aunts, maybe?”

“Do you remember them?” Natasha asked. 

“My aunts?” James shrugged. “Some.” He brought the metal hand up to cautiously stroke along Liho’s flank, catching the moonlight with a cold glitter. That was progress. “There was a lot of ‘em. I worked out my family tree, I think, at one point. But there’s nobody to ask anymore. Except,” but he stopped. 

“Steve,” Natasha said. 

“Steve,” James repeated. 

“He’s still looking for you,” she said. 

He looked alarmed. “Did you— did you tell him,” he said. 

“I’ve told him that our paths have crossed,” she answered. “I’ve told him you seemed well. I’ve told him that your enemies are mine and you seem to be doing a fine job on your own. But I haven’t told him just how closely our paths have crossed.”

“Please,” James said, “don’t. I— I got pretty close to him, recently, tried to— and I just— I can’t. I don’t know what to say to him.”

“He won’t make you say anything difficult,” Natasha said. “He can be very kind.”

“Don’t lecture me about Steve fucking Rogers,” James said. “I know Steve fucking Rogers. And there are a lot of things he is. But he’s not fucking _kind_. That’s not the word for it at all. Unless they transplanted somebody else’s personality into him.”

“Leave me a message for him,” Natasha said. 

“No,” James said. The moon was edging towards his face, a sliver catching just the edge of his profile as he leaned forward a little. “No, I—“ He trailed off, and looked down as he petted Liho contemplatively. “Tell him I’m all right. Tell him I have things to take care of. Tell him I remember him.”

She thought of the name carved in his arm. Underlined three times. “Has most of it come back?”

“I have a lot of Steve puzzle pieces,” James said, digging his flesh-and-blood fingers in through Liho’s sleek, short hair. “Most of them I can place. Sometimes I lose the connections.” He shrugged. 

He still looked exhausted. Natasha pulled out her phone. “Let me scan you,” she said. “Let me find those trackers.”

James stared down at Liho, not moving except for the hand petting her. “Okay,” he said, and gathered Liho in his arms and stood up. He looked uncomfortable. Liho wriggled, and he put her down, and she twined around his ankles as Natasha pulled up her scanning app. “Left shoulderblade, ribs on right side, back of pelvic bone on left side.”

She nodded, and held the phone a careful distance away, starting with the back of his pelvis. “I have to touch you,” she said quietly, “I’m getting interference where your clothes are wrinkled.”

He hitched up his shirt and jacket, leaning forward slightly, and she smoothed the fabric of his trousers against the back of his hip with her fingers. She frowned at the results, but said, “Usable,” and let go. He shucked his jacket and pulled his shirt up, exposing his back, and she could see a few awful lines of scarring from recent injuries, still healing. The line where metal met skin was ragged and raw, silvery old scars intersecting with newer ones, and she wondered if he injured himself routinely while using the prosthetic arm. Somehow she wasn’t surprised by it, as if she’d seen it before. 

She shook that thought away, kept looking. He was bruised across the ribcage. She put out her hand despite herself, framing his shoulder blade in the crook between her thumb and forefinger. His skin was barely warmer than her cold hands, and he tensed as she touched him. 

The scan was confusing, and she re-did it several times, framing the spot with her fingers again to help refine the results. “It’s built in to the metal,” she said.

“They used a rivet gun to attach it,” James said. “I couldn’t see what they were doing but I recognized the equipment all right.”

“You were conscious,” she said, but it wasn’t all that surprising. 

He nodded, but didn’t speak, and she scanned it one more time. “Yes,” she said. “Two rivets.”

“Knock the heads off with a chisel, you should be able to work it loose without drilling out the pins,” he said. 

She swallowed. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Her medic wasn’t squeamish, but wasn’t likely to enjoy that. “We could knock you out before we try it.”

“Not a chance,” he said, turning his head, and in profile she could see his lips were curved in a bitter smile. “I might not even let you do it at all, don’t push your luck.”

She went around to his right side and he raised the arm, holding his half-removed shirt in place with the left hand. This side was less bruised, less scarred. There was no sign of where the tracker would be, so she did a more general scan, then closed in. He had a holster under his arm, and he’d had to unbuckle it to pull the shirt up. It held an American Colt .45, an M1911 like Steve favored. Old-fashioned US Army issue, pre-NATO standard. She rarely used them but her hands knew how it would feel, knew the single-action draw of it, knew the old-fashioned pressure-plate safety of this particular model.

She’d never fired Steve’s. She didn’t remember when she’d fired one like this. But her hands knew how it would feel, her arms knew the kick. 

“This one is bigger,” she said. “Bigger than the others. But it looks easier to remove.”

“Probably has the alarm sensor in it, then,” James said. 

“You still can’t stay anywhere longer than an hour or so?” she asked. 

He shrugged. “Sometimes I stay up to five,” he said. “If I’m comfortable and have good sight lines. And they’re kinda lazy, I know if I’m somewhere it’s a pain in the ass to reach they probably won’t come for me.”

“Do you have a sniper rifle?” she asked. He shook his head. 

“Nothing better than a pistol,” he said. “I travel light, nowadays.”

She refined the scan one more time, tracing her fingers along the soft skin of his ribcage. He was thin, too thin; clearly his body was meant to be solid and sturdy, but he was wiry, rawboned, run ragged. 

The scan came up clearly and she looked at it, absently leaving her other hand on his skin. He had goosebumps, and his skin was cooling. “Can I, uh,” he said, and she looked up into his face and pulled her hand back with a start. 

“Of course,” she said, and he tugged his shirt back down but didn’t step away from her. His head was tilted, staring at her with easily-read wistfulness and longing. “James,” she said quietly, but she didn’t pull away. Would he— she tilted her head up, and yes. Yes he would. 

He caught her jaw delicately with his right hand, his fingers cold and rough, callused. His lips were full and soft and slid against hers, tasting of the wine they both had been drinking, and he kissed her familiarly, tenderly and sweetly. It sent a shock right through her; she hadn’t been kissed like that in a long time. 

It was the wine that made him taste familiar, the leather and gun oil that made him smell familiar, she didn’t know him, she didn’t know him, but she couldn’t pull away. He pulled back first, with a small injured noise. 

“Natasha,” he said, “don’t—“

“I’m sorry,” she said, putting the back of her wrist to her mouth— she had been pressed all along his front, had felt the solid weight of his body, wanted— it was quite a long time indeed since she’d _wanted_ like that. “James, I’m sorry,” she said. 

“Don’t—“ he said, and his hand was shaking. He grabbed the rail of the fire escape. “Don’t do that to me, Natasha, I _know_ you’re not her, don’t _test_ me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, shaken; she hadn’t meant to do it at all, really, hadn’t meant to tilt her head up to him like that.  But he wasn’t wrong, it had been a test. Her control should be better than that. 

He stepped back one more pace, disappearing into the last pocket of shadow on the fire escape. “Wait,” she said. “James!”

But he had swung over the edge, and he was gone. 

Liho mewed forlornly from the windowsill. 

“I didn’t mean that,” Natasha told her, but the cat’s eyes glowed balefully in the poor light, and she turned and jumped through the window with a dismissive flick of her tail.


	3. Chapter 3

 

“Oh my _God_ ,” Natasha said, “you’re an _asshole_ ,” and shoved Clint’s shoulder. Clint snickered, and she followed up the shove with a smack. “You are a child! A child! Why do I waste my time with a child?”

“I’m completely a grown-up,” Clint said, producing the key to her apartment which he had totally just pick-pocketed from her. He unlocked the door as she smacked him again. 

“Ha,” she said, “you wretch,” and she wrestled her keys back out of his hand. 

“Liho,” Clint said, making kissy noises, “Liho!” He claimed not to be a cat person but he had spent a great deal of time coaxing Liho into tolerating his sometimes-too-rough affection.

But no cat answered. Natasha shoved her keys back into her pocket and stopped dead, about an inch from shutting the door. There was a breeze. A window was open. 

Clint had noticed too, and turned to sign to her-- _window? open?_

She shook her head slightly, signed back _visitor_ , and walked carefully into her bedroom. Liho greeted her from the open window, and there was something white wrapped around her collar. 

She stuck her head out the window. “James?” But there was no one on the fire escape.

“Liho,” Clint said, and came up next to her, holding the cat. “What’s this?”

Natasha unwrapped the white thing from Liho’s collar. It was a scrap of paper, torn off something-- a flyer from a lamppost, torn without regard to the text. Inside was a scrawled message, nearly illegible, in a distinctive dark red smudge. 

“Yo,” Clint said, “is that blood?”

“Yes,” Natasha said, puzzling it out. It was in Cyrillic characters, but those weren’t Russian words. “Ora-- pro nobis.” Latin. “Pray for us?”

“Pssh,” Clint said. “I don’t speak Latin. But why does it say that on your cat’s collar?”

“There’s blood in her fur,” Natasha said, alarmed; she combed through it with her fingers but could find no injury. Just matted blood, mostly dried, a little tacky in a few places.

“Not injured,” Clint said-- he was good with animals, he’d probably already noticed that. “But-- who’s James?”

“An occasional visitor,” Natasha said. “Very popular with the cat.” She frowned at the blood on her fingers, then reread the message. “Ora pro nobis.” _Pray for us_. It was in the Hail Mary. 

“We got a mission?” Clint asked. 

“I think we do,” Natasha said. “Ora pro nobis. Pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.”

“That’s ominous as fuck,” Clint said. 

“James is generally ominous as fuck,” she answered. She spared Clint a glance. “He’s the Winter Soldier.”

Clint swore in Arabic, a really appalling one featuring the genitals of one’s sister; he normally reserved it for trivial things but was occasionally startled into sincerity. Then he said, “So the rumors are true! Fuck, I owe Maria Hill twenty bucks.”

“What?”

“I thought we were tight, Natasha,” Clint said. “I figured I’d know if you’d formed an alliance with the Soldier. I thought it was just rumors.”

“It is just rumors,” Natasha said. “I am not allied with him. I am not working with him. He just comes over and pets my cat sometimes and if you even make a pussy joke I will stab you, you savage.”

Clint held up the hand that wasn’t holding the cat, palm outward, in surrender. “All right, all right, I-- it would’ve been funny, though, Natasha, you know it.”

Natasha sighed. “I have killed men for less,” she said, “and you are not as funny as you think you are in any given situation.”

“I’m hilarious,” Clint said. “Even Captain America thinks so sometimes. Does he know you hang out with the Winter Soldier?”

“Yes,” Natasha said, “I have passed messages between them.” She reread the scrawled message. This was James’s blood. He was injured. He had come here, and had waited for her, but she had not been home. He had written a line from a prayer and left it with her cat, and had left. “Ora pro nobis.” It was a plea for help, clearly. 

“Yeah,” Clint said. “Creepy.”

“He has embedded trackers,” Natasha said, thinking out loud. “If he stays in one place more than an hour or two HYDRA comes for him. He keeps moving. I don’t think he sleeps. I have been trying to convince him to come in and get them removed but clearly he has trust issues and clearly he has reasons for those.” She stared at the paper. “If he is bleeding and he came here it was because he needed help, but he could not wait for me, he wouldn’t risk drawing them down on me.”

“Oh,” Clint said, abruptly more serious as he caught her mood. 

“So-- was he just letting me know I’d missed him, or asking me to come find him?” Natasha tapped her fingers against the windowsill. 

“Tell us, Liho,” Clint said. “Tell us what you saw.”

“She’s not Lassie,” Natasha said.

“And this isn’t the movies so we can’t bring her to look with us,” Clint said. 

“A church,” Natasha said. “He is old. He was Catholic. He might-- maybe?” There were three churches in this neighborhood. 

“Could be,” Clint said. “Guess we should look.”

“If you find him,” Natasha said, “do not approach him, just call me.”

“I ain’t gettin’ near him,” Clint said. 

 

 

Two churches were empty, the nicer two. Natasha took the third, a somewhat ramshackle old Catholic church that was falling on increasingly hard times as the population of the city skewed less and less devout.  As she picked the lock on the door she felt the tumblers click over and had a suspicion that she wasn’t the first to pick this lock. She also had a suspicion about the door, and abruptly pulled her lockpicks away and stepped back. 

Sure enough, there was a tiny wire protruding from the hinge. He wouldn’t have booby-trapped the door, would he? But she wasn’t going to chance it. 

She scaled the back wall instead and carefully, carefully jimmied open a window. She crawled inside and found herself in the choir loft, in the shadows of the organ pipes. Soundlessly, she crept forward, looking for-- what, she didn’t know. 

A sound brought her up short: the hammer of a pistol being carefully, quietly thumbed back. She froze, concealed as she was in shadow, and evaluated. If it was him, she should call out to him. If it wasn’t him-- and it wasn’t like James to set a booby trap in a church door to blow up innocent clerics-- then there was a strong possibility HYDRA had already been here and taken him, and left a trap now for her. 

She put her hand to the pistol at her left thigh, and on impulse made her best imitation of Liho’s friendly-visitor inquiry noise. “Mrrup?”

The silence was deafening. After a moment she made Liho’s disgruntled noise. “Mmew.”

“Liho?” The voice was soft, and very rusty, but identifiably James. 

“James,” she said, unholstering the pistol. If it was a trap, this was when they’d spring it.

“Natalia,” he said, in Russian, “time has run out.”

“I am sorry it took me so long,” she said. 

“There is a sensor on the door,” he said. “If they come in that way it will set off a flashbang. I wanted to use a real grenade but if it isn’t them I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“If it is a ninety-year-old priest it will kill him anyway,” Natasha said. “This is ridiculous. When we are done with this I am carving my phone number into your arm. How badly are you injured?”

“Not badly,” he said, “I just-- every time I move it re-opens and bleeds again. I have been trying to keep still.”

Natasha sighed, holstered her pistol, and stepped forward. James’s metal arm glittered in the colored streaks the streetlight threw through the stained glass windows in the nave. As she drew closer she realized that the darker area on the floor wasn’t another shadow, it was blood. 

“Shit,” she said, and pulled out her phone. “Hawkeye,” she said, “I found him, I need a perimeter, he’s pretty sure HYDRA’s coming.”

“You got it,” Clint drawled.

“But avoid the door,” she went on. “Don’t open the front door whatever you do.”

“That sounds like a hilarious story,” he said. “I’ll be outside.”

She put her phone away and knelt next to James. “I have reinforcements,” she said. 

His face was dead white, and his hair stuck to his skin with sweat, and through the impassive look he was giving her she could tell he was absolutely terrified, nearly paralyzed with it. “I won’t go in,” he said quietly, emotionless. “I won’t—“

“I won’t ask you to,” she said. “James. I won’t ask you to.”

“How are you going to do this, then?” he asked. 

“My car is outside,” she said. “As is my closest friend. He can get us out, I can patch you up, and we do not have to stop in any one place for longer than a couple of hours until you are well enough to be on your own.”

“I can’t,” James said, “Nat— who?”

“Clint,” she said. “Hawkeye. The Avengers’ sniper. I trust him with my life, and he wouldn’t betray you either.”

“I heard about him,” James said. He hadn’t put his pistol down. His legs were sprawled out in front of him, one knee pulled up and his right arm propped on it. He was clearly light-headed and on the verge of passing out. “Him and those alien things.”

She nodded, just as her phone buzzed. It was Clint. “Coast is clear for now,” he said. “I got a position, I’m keeping an eye out for company.”

“Think you could un-rig the booby trap on the door for me?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t take more than a minute or so,” Hawkeye said. “Should I call for backup, or what?”

“Maybe,” Natasha said. She sized James up. It was an injury in the body somewhere, probably organ damage if there was this much blood, and if he weren’t amped up on some form of super soldier serum he’d’ve died of shock already. “We’re not bringing him in, Clint, I’m taking him away.”

“Yeah,” Clint said, “sure, but, it seems to me like this is a primo opportunity to shoot a bunch of HYDRA fish in a barrel, y’dig? Like, if you treat him in situ for a bit, we rig up some quick escape route for him, and then station say, me, six or seven other guys, maybe Bobbi, shit, maybe if Logan’s in town— you on my page, here?”

“I am,” Natasha said, and glanced over at James. He was clearly listening; whatever serum they’d used on him, it had given him hearing like Rogers’s. 

“Not Steve,” James said. “Not—“

“Steve’s out of town,” Natasha said. “He’s still on the mission Clint and I just got back from. But Clint’s not wrong. It’s a good call.”

 

It took Natasha half an hour and several sutures, done by flashlight, to get the bleeding from James’s gut wound under control. Clint leaned in the window at one point and handed Natasha a pair of comms, but James refused to take one. So Natasha put hers in and kept the other. Once she managed to get a layer of bandages to stay white for five minutes without blood soaking through, she helped James carefully to his feet and slowly, slowly, slowly down the stairs, slowly down the central aisle, slowly back behind the altar and into the little vestibule there. There was another exit, invisibly guarded, and Natasha’s comm was reassuringly whispering with near-silent check-ins from half a dozen people she trusted. 

James sat, stiffly slouched, in a chair, looking exhausted and drained. Even still, she watched his eyes track something outside her awareness— there, a flit of shadow across stained-glass, one of her friends changing position. She couldn’t even guess how he’d seen the movement. “You have a lot of friends, Natal— Tasha,” he murmured. 

“I do, now,” she answered. On impulse she reached out and took his hand. He’d had to holster his pistol to hang on to her, and his right hand lay limp and blood-encrusted on his thigh. His skin was freezing. “I trust these people. And they trust me enough that they won’t make me bring you in. You can go wherever you want me to take you.”

“Why not make me come in?” he asked. 

“To SHIELD?” she asked. “Or to Stark Industries? Or where? I don’t really work for anyone, James. I work for myself, I work for the Avengers, I work for whomever I choose. There’s no one I trust to employ me exclusively, and there’s no one I trust with you.”

Clint’s voice hissed into her ear. “Trap’s about to spring,” he said. “Get the bait out safe and check in when you can.”

“Roger that,” Natasha said, “Widow out. Thanks y’all.” She stood up and jerked her head at the door. “This exit’s covered.”

 

After about half an hour of driving, James’s white-knuckled grip on the car door armrest eased. “Where are you taking me?” he asked. 

“Where do you want to go?” Natasha asked. 

“I don’t know,” he said. 

“Want to go see my friend the medic who can cut those trackers out of you and stitch you up so your guts stay in your body?” Natasha shot him a look. He looked pale, grim, and thoroughly unenthused. 

“Not really,” he admitted finally. “I’m, I’ll heal on my own. I don’t— I’m not very— fond of medics.”

“Well, that’s fine then,” Natasha said. She’d sort of expected this. She called up the navigation system on the dash. “So far I’ve driven a route that looks like a hand flipping the bird,” she said, and showed him. “Once I finish the last knuckle I was going to head down this-a-way. I figure the farther I am from any major airfields the harder it’ll be for them to get anyone to intercept us.”

James blinked for a moment, frowning. She could see the moment he understood the picture she’d drawn with her route; he didn’t laugh but his eyelids flickered in fleeting, but clear, amusement. “How long do you plan to keep driving?” he asked. 

Natasha shrugged. “I have 400 more miles on this tank of gas,” she said. “Pull up some tunes on the stereo, recline the seat, let’s see if you can’t actually get some sleep.”

 

Improbably enough he not only had a smartphone compatible with her stereo and equipped with a subscription to a streaming music site, but also had several really well-constructed playlists featuring mostly music he had no right to have ever heard of before. Still more improbably, his eyes drifted shut and by the time she was on the highway he’d passed the fuck out. 

The music laid softly over the top of his quiet, steady breathing sustained Natasha across several state lines. She eventually needed to answer a call of nature and stretch her legs, so she slowed down gradually and pulled into a rest stop. He woke instantly when she eased off the accelerator, but gave almost no sign until she had stopped.

He rubbed his face, taking a heavier breath, and looked blearily over at her, eyes taking in the clock on the dashboard and the scene through the windshield. “Fuck,” he said blearily.

“Three hours,” she said, knowing he’d want to know how much time had passed. 

James rubbed his right hand across his belly, pressing much harder than she would have. “Bleeding’s stopped,” he said. 

“Stay with the car,” she said. “I’m going to use the restroom and buy a sandwich or something. Do you want any provisions?”

He looked hopeful. “Whatever they got?” His cheekbones were sharp, eyes hollow, and she gave him an assessing look and figured he needed a couple thousand calories and a whole lot of fluids. 

“Big bottle of water in the door pocket next to you,” she said, “and I’ll get you something hot with protein and fat.”

“Throw in a little sugar and I might be yours forever,” he said, with an eyebrow quirk and twist of the lips that was astonishingly compelling. 

“Forever is either a very long time, for our kind, or a shockingly short one,” she said, and went in and got him three orders of fries, two hamburgers, two chicken sandwiches, a massive cola, and three fruit pies. She got herself a normal meal combo and a coffee, and on impulse bought a kid’s meal with a toy. The toy was an action figure of Iron Man.

“Sometimes in cartoons,” James said, surveying the bags of food, “they have characters get these hearts, for their eyes?”

“Yeah?” Natasha folded the paper back on her chicken sandwich as she put the car into gear. 

“I never really got that until now,” James said. “Now, I know what they mean.”

“My favorite,” she said, “is when the smell of a thing has, like, these lines, that extend across the screen, and lift the character by their nostrils, and pull them to the thing.”

“Oh yeah,” James said. “This could probably do that to me.”

“Can you really eat all this?” Natasha asked as she negotiated the highway on-ramp. 

“Yeah,” James said, “the wounds are all closed. I got kind of high caloric needs when I’m healing.”

Sure enough, he ate it all, and managed an actual honest-to-god real laugh at the Iron Man figurine, and fell back asleep after arranging it in a slightly obscene pose on the dashboard. Despite the foolishness, Natasha took a photograph of it with her phone after he fell asleep, and texted it to Tony without stopping the car. 

 

She’d refilled the tank. The sun came up and she stopped again. She’d taken a stealthy picture of James passed-out in the passenger’s seat, and finally texted it to Clint and to Bobbi. James woke up and she showed it to him, and he laughed shyly, and it was so familiar it was like a hook under her ribs. 

She got out of the car and stood next to it, leaning on the hood, ostensibly stretching. She’d done the math. There was no time for her to have known him. Not the way he said.

A weird part of her uncharacteristically wanted it to be true, though. 

He unfolded himself out of the car to stand next to her, stiff but moving a lot better than he had the night before. “I’ve just had six hours’ sleep in eight hours,” he said. “I’m the most lucid I can ever actually remember being.”

“Fancy going to get those trackers removed?” she asked. “Because then you could sleep for days, if you wanted.” She gave him a squinty look. “With Liho on your face. She loves to sleep on faces and I don’t let her. I bet you would let her.”

He gave her an inappropriately adoring face, as if struck dumb by her. “Liho,” he said, smiling crookedly. “If I had my choice, it’s not the cat I’d want sleeping on my—” but he bit it off and suddenly turned away, looking stricken. “I almost,” he stuttered, “I forgot— I keep thinking you are her. I— I’m sorry.” He folded his arm across his midsection, stumbled a couple of paces, leaned against the car’s trunk. She thought, for a wild moment, he might cry.

“You _loved_ her,” Natasha said wonderingly. She had been envisioning— she didn’t know what she had been envisioning— but this, it clearly went beyond that, for him. 

His shoulders shook— both of them— and then he went still. After a long moment he breathed in, then out. Finally he looked back at her, face blank. “How could I not?” he asked. 

It was such a perfectly astonishing answer that she stared at him without speaking until he turned away and walked into the rest stop. She refilled the tank again, and to distract herself from her unsettledness, texted Steve the photo of James’s sleeping face. 

 

“No medic,” James said finally, when they were on the road again. He’d cleaned up, washed his face and hands, changed his bandages, bought them breakfast and more bottles of water. He looked a lot more alive, more alert, sharper. “I’ll deal with the trackers on my own.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Natasha said, but he didn’t answer, and they drove in silence for a while. Finally she gave in, and said, “Where do you want me to drop you off?”

He glanced over at her. “Where are we headed?”

“Back around in a big loop,” she said. “I can drop you off anywhere within the tri-state area.”

Her phone rang. It was Steve. He was saved in her phone as “Captain ASSmerica” and had a picture of a bald eagle as his icon. “Can you get that?” she said. “I’m driving.”

James held her phone in his hand for a moment, staring at it. Plainly, he was conversant with her sense of humor, somehow, and knew who this was. “You sent him that picture,” he said. “Of me.”

“Yes,” she admitted. 

He steeled himself, hit the button, and said, “You are saved in Natalia’s phone as Captain Assmerica.”

There was dead silence on the line for twenty-two seconds, Natasha counted. “Bucky,” Steve said, tinny through the little speakers. She hit the button and the Bluetooth picked up, so his voice would come through the stereo.

“Steve, you gotta stop followin’ me,” James said. “You gotta give it a rest. I can’t come in.”

“Bucky,” Steve said again, sounding broken.

“You are literally the only person in the world who is ever gonna think of me by that name again,” James said. “You gotta stay away from me, Rogers. There ain’t much left of that Bucky kid, and I won’t have you replacing what’s left of him in your memory with any of my metric tons of bullshit.”

“Just tell me you’re safe,” Steve said, audibly choked up. The speakers made it sound as if he were in the car, all around them.

“I am safe,” James said, closing his eyes. “As long as I keep movin’, Steve, as long as I stay ahead of ‘em, as long as I hit ‘em before they hit me, I’m safe. Don’t slow me down, and I’ll be safe.”

“You’re with Natasha?” Steve said. 

“Yes,” James said. “She helped me set a trap for them. They’ll stay at a distance for a while now. They’re weak, Steve. I got ‘em on the ropes. You come in and work with Natasha’s people and you can finish ‘em off for me and take alla the credit like you always did.” His voice shook; it was an attempt at a laugh. 

“I,” Steve said, “Bucky, I just— I want to see you.”

“If we win,” James said, “if we beat ‘em, if it’s safe— but Steve, to everyone else, to the rest of the world, I’m one of them. I’m the fuckin’ Winter Soldier, Steve, I can’t just go pal around with Captain America.”

“You’re Bucky Barnes,” Steve said fiercely, “and you’re a fuckin’ war hero—“

“And I have killed a fuckload of people and done a lot of very bad things for a lot of very bad people, Steve,” James said tiredly. “That’s not gonna go away just because I didn’t mean it, that’s not gonna be all better in the eyes of the world just ‘cause you want it to, and I’m definitely not gonna get healed by the magic power of your jerk face.”

Steve stuttered for a moment, then said, “Healed? Bucky, are you okay? You said you were okay.”

“I’m fuckin’ fine, asshole,” James said, “as fine as a guy can be with fuckin’ brain damage, but I’m not Bucky Barnes anymore and I can’t be him again. I gotta figure out who I can be, you get that? When I know who I am, then I’ll come see how that stacks up against what you think about it, but in the meantime I got a lot to do just to stay alive and I don’t have time to take care of you. You gotta look out for yourself. You got that, Rogers?”

There was a pause, and finally Steve said, softly, “Bucky, I don’t care who you are now, we been through all kinds of shit together. You been there for me through the worst of it. Let me help you through this.”

“You are helping,” James said. “You are. I can’t kill all these stupid motherfuckers on my own. I need you to do your part. And then, afterward, we’ll talk. All right?”

“Bucky,” Steve said. 

“All right?” James repeated, ruthless. 

Steve sighed. “All right,” he said. 

James disconnected the call and shoved her phone into the cup holder, rubbing his face. “Fuckin’ Steve fuckin’ Rogers,” he said, and his voice shook. 

“He’s one of my favorite people in the world,” Natasha said, “but I know what you mean.”

“The more I remember the more I think that even when I was his Bucky I wasn’t his Bucky,” James said, then shook his head. “I have an address for you to let me out.”

She navigated to the address he told her, which was a couple of hundred miles away from her apartment. He collected himself calmly, and when she pulled over— it was an abandoned warehouse, of all things, but it stood next to an active freight yard, and it wasn’t hard to guess he’d be on a train within an hour— he put his hand on the door handle.

“Wait,” she said. He looked over at her. “Give me your hand.”

At her gesture, he brought his right hand over to her, and she took it in one of hers, pushed his sleeve up, and wrote her phone number in the clearest patch of skin she could find. Most of his self-inflicted tattoos looked faded and not fresh, which she took as a hopeful sign that he was having fewer memory issues. 

“Next time, call or text me,” she said. “I can answer the phone more reliably than Liho.”

He gave her a slow smile that made her have to swallow fiercely against the sudden overwhelming desire to kiss him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, gently extricated his hand from hers, and was gone.

 

It wasn’t until she got home that she noticed he’d taken the Iron Man figurine with him.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Story earns its Explicit rating. M/F, consensual.

Natasha frowned at the unlisted number on her phone. Clint always had hilarious caller ID aliases when he called her from a new number. This one was an East Coast cellphone area code, nothing that rang a bell, and she stepped out onto the patio to answer it.

“Yes what,” she said, which generally was the best approach to something like this. There was another partygoer on the patio, a man in a flannel shirt and skinny jeans, smoking and staring moodily, and quite transparently hoping she’d notice him.

A man laughed. “I know I’m old-fashioned,” he said, “but whatever happened to hello?”

Her city-girl socialite cover identity provided an excuse for the way she smiled like an idiot, but not for the way her heart lurched. “James,” she said, then with a sharp stab of worry went on, “Are you— in trouble again?”

“Can’t a guy call just to catch up?” he asked mildly. 

“Given that you’ve never actually called before?” she answered. “Not really.”

His breath whooshed in a way that might have been a soft laugh, and he said, “Fair point.” She let the silence spool out a moment, and he eventually followed it up with, “Well, I got a weird craving to talk to someone like I was a real person, and you’re about the only number I got in my phone who I thought might oblige me.”

“Are you in town?” she asked. “We could actually meet face to face, talk in person like, you know, _actual_ real people.” The smoking hipster guy stubbed his cigarette on the railing, openly watching her, and she rolled her eyes for his benefit, flirting coyly as if it were a presumptuous suitor on the phone.

Maybe it was. Maybe it could be. 

Her world didn’t work like that but it was, at times, diverting to pretend.

“I just spent half an hour on your balcony petting your cat,” he admitted. His voice was low, rough, intimate in her ear, and she liked it a lot more than she ought to.

“Creepy,” she said, laughing in a way that telegraphed to Hipster Smoking Guy, along with her body language, that she didn’t think so at all. “Did you at least lock up when you left?”

“Of course I did,” he said, indignant. After a moment he said, “You know I don’t— I open the window, but I wouldn’t go in. Not if you’re not there. I knock first, and if you don’t answer I just let the cat out and pet her.”

“Do you not come by when I’m there on purpose?” she asked.

“You’re never home,” he said. “And I don’t come by that much. I still got those trackers.”

“Do you want to have them forever?” she asked. “Or do you want them gone?”

He was silent for a long moment. “I think one is booby-trapped,” he said. 

“I would have seen that,” she said, cutting off the words _when I scanned you_ because she might be overheard here, it wouldn’t do for Nadine to be overheard talking about body scans. Nadine was an heiress who dabbled in publishing. Nadine’s phone’s most-used app was Facebook, not a top-secret Starktech materials scanner.

“No,” he said, and his voice had sunk to be very quiet. “I think you’re not supposed to be able to.” 

“Do you have any info about it?” she asked. Info, not intel.

“Maybe,” he said. 

“I have a radical notion,” Natasha said, leaning against the railing and twirling some of her hair around her finger. “We could talk about this over drinks.”

“Are you on an op?” James asked suspiciously. 

She giggled, leaning against the other side of the railing, emoting with every line of her body that she was into this conversation, and really not interested in Smoker Guy who was pretty transparently hanging out in hopes of getting her to talk to him. From his body language, he was already preparing to get hostile and resentful when she ignored him. “Wellll,” she said, drawing it out, “it turns out, nothing I can’t walk away from.”

“If you’re working— I clearly don’t need anything urgently,” James said. 

“This isn’t a question of what anyone _needs_ ,” Natasha said. Hipster Guy was going to tell everyone about this bitch who was so cold to him at a party, she could smell it from here. Oh God, he was absolutely an aspiring author who had come to this party to pitch her a manuscript. “James. James, I could tell you what _I_ need.”

He made a soft noise that might have been a laugh. “I would like that,” he said. 

“I am going to text you an address,” she said. “And I am going to meet you there in half an hour. And we are going to drink, and eat junk, and I am going to convince you to get the surgery you need to save your life.”

Maybe Aspiring Author Guy would steal that and have an original plot point for once. Probably not, though. 

“It’s not quite that dire,” James said. 

“It kind of is, though,” she said. 

“I’ve been making all my routes take the shape of hands flipping the bird,” James mused. His breathing had picked up a little, as had ambient traffic and wind sounds; he was outside, walking now. “Such a good idea.”

“I really hope they keep close enough track to notice that detail,” Natasha said. 

“They do,” James said. “Don’t worry. But enough about them. You were going to tell me what you needed. I would like that, to be able perhaps to offer you something in return.”

Natasha laughed. “You know,” she said, “we can discuss that. I’m texting you that address now. See you in thirty.”

“Aye, aye,” James said, and hung up. 

She disconnected the call and turned around, fixing the Aspiring Author with a steely stare. He blinked, taken aback; he’d clearly been rehearsing his opening line. “Now’s not a good time,” she said.

His face twisted. “Stuck-up bitches always think guys are trying to hit on them,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “I had assumed you were going to pitch me your novel,” she said, “but it’s clearly not a good time to hit on me either, so admit I don’t know _what_ you were thinking. Maybe don’t come to industry functions like this if you’re not prepared to be professional.”

“I,” he said, gaping like a fish. 

“You are not nearly as clever as you think,” she said, “and you need to do an awful lot of work on your personality to make up for it, and you should be grateful I’m having such a rough night or nobody would ever have had the balls to tell you this.” She shoved her phone into her pocket, and turned her back on him, hoping he’d do something stupid like grab her arm. Breaking a man’s wrist would help her focus. 

But no, he didn’t try anything. So she had to content herself with making her way calmly out of the party. 

She bought supplies along the way, and arrived five minutes late. She wasn’t surprised not to see James waiting by the door to the apartment building. She let herself in and went up, unloading her various shopping bags onto the kitchen counters, and had just set the grungy kettle to boil when she heard the window scraping.

“I’m in the kitchen,” she called out. It wasn’t her nicest safehouse, but it was one she visited often, to keep people off her trail when going to her real apartment. This was a grungy, poorly-furnished, unglamorous little studio, but she kept it clean and stocked enough for basic needs, and once in a while cleared the bugs out. 

“Hey,” James said, appearing in the doorway. He was skinny and grubby, hair ragged and face bruised, but he looked good. Really good. She didn’t know what exactly appealed to her so much. It was kind of bothering her. Well, bothering the small part of her that wasn’t preoccupied with being appealed to.

“Do me a favor,” she said, “sweep for bugs? I haven’t cleaned this place in a while.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, saluting, and set the grubby military-surplus knapsack he was carrying on the kitchen stool to dig through it. 

“You want tea, wine, vodka, or hot cocoa?” she asked, while he fiddled with an esoteric piece of equipment. It looked like SHIELD issue, but then, so was pretty much all of HYDRA’s kit, so it stood to reason he’d be able to get his hands on it.

He snorted. “Just fuck me up,” he said. 

“What?” She turned, and he was grinning at her. 

“It’s an Internet thing,” he said. “Just, whatever you’re having, I’d love some.”

“I know it’s an Internet thing,” she said. “I just— I didn’t know you were into, you know, memes.” Wine, then. She opened the bottle and rinsed out two mismatched mugs. “No fancy dishes here,” she said. 

“I’m offended,” he said, sweeping along the doorframe molding with his metal hand. She wasn’t sure if he meant the dishes or her presumption that he wasn’t Internet-lingo-savvy, but she didn’t suppose it mattered.

She made instant soup, and by the time she set the bowls and mugs down on the battered coffee table-cum-nightstand, James was standing on the stool disassembling the light fixture in the wall sconce. 

“Soup’s on,” she said. 

“I think you’re clean,” he said, poking gingerly at the wiring with his right hand. 

“I should be,” she said, “I just like to check.” She came and stood next to him while he put the light fixture back together, noticing how nicely his ass filled out his grubby jeans, since it was eye level. She had a crazy urge to pinch his butt. 

He glanced down at her, smiled fondly, and visibly checked himself, going quiet and solemn. “I,” he said, “I keep— mistaking you for—“ He looked away.

When he finished with the light, she held out her hand so he could get down without landing heavily, and he took it. She didn’t step back, staying within his personal space and looking up at his face. 

“Tell me about her,” she said quietly. “Tell me about Natalia.” She stepped back, tugging him toward the futon by his human hand. 

He sat down, a cautiously judicious distance away from her, and picked up the mug of wine. “This is fancy,” he said, with a flash of amusement. 

“Only the finest,” she said, settling herself down comfortably, bowl of soup warming her hands. “So. Natalia.”

James grimaced, took another swallow of wine, and set the mug down. “I might remember things out of order,” he said. “And I don’t have much reference with the outside world. I don’t know what year things were. It seems to me like it would have been the fifties, from what I remember of my arm’s technology.”

“I was born in 1984,” Natasha said. 

He nodded, not looking at her. “Best I can figure,” he said quietly, “there was a real person all these things I remember happened with, but they overwrote her with you. I read your files, all the stuff I remember is definitely you even though none of the dates line up. It doesn’t make sense, but there it is.”

She fidgeted with the bowl, letting that little tell show for a moment before she locked herself back down. “I don’t remember you,” she said, “not like— like that. But a lot of things you do are familiar. And I… I know things about you that— that I can’t know. I just.” She wiggled the fingers of one hand, tapping them against the soup bowl. “I know what you taste like, James. But I don’t know why.”

He took a sharp breath, looked away, breathed out slowly. “I can’t even get angry anymore,” he said. “At what they did to me. To us. I just— there’s so much, if I start to get angry I won’t ever stop. So I don’t.” He laughed bitterly. “But I just— if it was you, how? And if it wasn’t you, who was she?” He shook his head. “And does it matter? She’d be dead now, of old age.”

Natasha set her bowl down and reached over, putting her hand around the back of James’s head, just above the nape of his neck, and pulled him in and kissed him. He fumbled his mug onto the coffee table and returned the kiss, fingers of his human hand sliding into her hair while his metal hand closed around her waist. 

Her heart thumped wildly— he tasted so familiar, he felt so right, even the metal hand, her body had absolutely done this before. She climbed into his lap and kissed him thoroughly, exhaustively, and it was some time later when she finally surfaced, breathing hard. 

“I don’t _remember_ ,” she said. “I don’t— but my body _does_ , James, I— _James_ ,” and she kissed him again and it was only with great difficulty that he extricated himself from her mouth. 

“Nata— sha,” he said, breathing hard. “Nat. I. This is torture. But I— if it _wasn’t_ you, how does my body remember yours so well?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and her heart was beating hard enough to shake her. “I don’t know, but I _want_ you, James.” His mouth was so red, and his eyes were so blue, his hands so strong— She grabbed the metal hand and hauled it up to her breast. “Please.”

He made a pained noise, fingers twitching convulsively, then kissed her again, pulling her more firmly into his lap. His hand moved surely against her breast, squeezing the soft flesh, sliding around her ribs to unfasten her bra deftly. “Yes,” she managed to gasp, and he pushed her bra up, pushed her shirt up, the metal was warm against her skin and she shivered into his touch. 

“Nat,” he said, voice muffled against her neck. She slid her weight sideways, pulling him down onto the futon. He moved his mouth down from her jaw to her throat, sucking lightly at her skin, and pushed her shirt up and off over her head, her bra with it. She wrapped her fingers into his hair and caught her breath as he mouthed his way down to her breast. 

“I want,” she panted, “James, I _want_ —“

“Yeah?” He looked up at her, laving his tongue over her nipple, and grinned, a faint air of awe overlaying his happiness. “God,” he said, “look at you.” He sat up a little, shoving himself up a little so he could reach her face to kiss her again. Her hair had come loose from its ponytail and he pushed it back away from her face gently with his human hand, gazing reverently into her face. “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

She collected herself, breathing hard, her body tingling where he was pressed against her. “I’m never sure about anything,” she said. “Being sure just makes you let down your guard.”

He stared at her like she’d just— done something really important, she was too distracted to come up with a good metaphor just then— and then tipped his head down against her shoulder and laughed. “Natasha,” he said, “oh my God, Natasha.” 

“What,” she said, combing her fingers through his hair. 

“We only have about 45 minutes until they come for me,” he said, directing his attentions to her breasts again, “so I can’t do what I really want to do to you, but I think maybe we can manage something adequate?”

“Maybe,” she said, lifting her hips to let him peel her out of her jeans. Her body knew him. Her body wanted him. Her body found him comforting and arousing and couldn’t get enough of him. He scraped his teeth gently along the bottom of her ribcage, kissed his way down her belly, and spread the metal hand across her stomach as he used the other hand to work her panties down her hips. 

She covered the metal hand with hers, lacing her fingers through his. It was familiar, warming to her touch, and it felt unexpectedly _alive_ , responsive and gentle. He glanced up at her, smiling, and tugged at her underwear as she kicked her feet to free them from her jeans. (Naked was a kind of vulnerable, but distracted one’s enemies just as much; trapped in one’s clothing was unacceptable.) 

“Whoa,” he said, pausing.

“That’s not something a girl wants to hear when a guy sees her naked,” she commented wryly, wriggling her underwear down to where she could hook it with her toes to pull herself free. 

He shot her a wry grin. “I seen enough to know fashions have changed,” he said, “but I can’t get used to women shaving down here.”

“It’s expected,” she said, sitting up on an elbow. “And it’s easier than just picking a point to stop, y’know?”

“I’m not complaining,” he said, licking his lips. “It gives a better view. It’s just. Uh.” He was staring, almost hungrily. “Can I?”

“You can do whatever you want,” she said fervently. She hadn’t even finished speaking before he’d surged forward and pressed his mouth to her, kissing softly at the outer part of her sex for just a brief moment before he opened his mouth and deepened the kiss, moving his tongue with a sense of sure familiarity. He made a low, fervent noise of pleasure as he tasted her, and she gasped and twitched her legs farther apart. 

Normally her sex noises were something of a performance, even when she was just having sex for fun, but she found herself making strange sounds, rising to an uncharacteristic guttural pitch as he slid his human fingers into her and pressed knowingly, familiarly up with strong, sure fingers. She swore, a long and heartfelt string of imprecations in Russian, and shoved herself down against him, wrapping her thighs around his head and clenching herself down on his fingers as the dizzy pleasure and tension built up. 

He groaned, face buried against her, tongue working, and she made a soft, shuddering noise and went still, suspended breathlessly against his purposeful movement. Her orgasm broke over her, sending tingling shockwaves out from her epicenter, and she buried her hands in his hair and held on for dear life as she shook and shook. 

Eventually he shoved himself up and sucked in a breath, and she pushed herself up on her elbow in alarm at how flushed his face was. “Oh God,” she said, “did I suffocate you?”

He laughed, and moved his hand with his fingers still inside her, which made her make an embarrassing mewling noise. “No,” he said, “I would’ve stopped if I didn’t like it.” He was breathing hard. “Nat—“

She grabbed him by the back of the neck and hauled him up to kiss him. “Take it off,” she said, shaky, “take it off—“ he still had his coat on, his shirt, his jeans, his boots.

“Half an hour,” he said. “We got like half an hour.”

She got his coat off him, unbuttoned his shirt, shoved his undershirt up, but abandoned that when it tangled in his pistol holster and went for his belt instead. There were two knives and another pistol in his belt; she unfastened it but left it within reach, and unbuttoned his jeans. 

“I barely shave my face,” he said, “I ain’t shaved down there. Just to warn you.”

“I don’t care,” she said, “I really don’t.”

“God you’re a sight when you’re on-task,” he said. 

“I am always on-task,” she answered. Somehow she wasn’t at all surprised, when she managed to navigate the labyrinth of his jeans and boxer-briefs, by the size or shape or weight of his cock, the way it felt in her hand, the way he was circumcised but there was still a little loose skin to work with, even the way it twitched in her hand and leaked a little. He groaned and let his head fall back against the futon. “James, fuck, I am going to ride you like I stole you.”

“And I’m gonna go off like a pistol,” he said shakily, “because I don’t think anybody’s touched me there this _century_.”

“I’m chemically sterilized,” she said. “That’s not a problem.” She climbed into his lap and lowered herself down onto him, and his hands closed around her hips, the right one hard enough to almost-bruise and the left whisper-light. 

“Nat,” he said, a shiver going through his whole body. She was so ready, so thoroughly aroused, that she took him with no difficulty, but she held still a moment, bending over him to take his mouth and suck on his tongue, her hands flat across his chest. She could feel his heartbeat through his breastbone under one hand, could feel the scars where his metal arm attached with the other hand. 

“Let’s make this quick,” she said, “and then we’re going to go cut those trackers out of you, and then you’re going to come and sleep in my bed and I’ll fight Liho over snuggling with you.”

“Nat,” he said again, pushing up into her shakily. She planted her hands on his chest and started to move, rocking her hips to put him where she wanted him. “Nat— I— okay— yes. Whatever you— you want.”

It felt good, it felt really good, and he rolled his hips up into her cooperatively, finding an easy rhythm. “You,” she said, “I want you,” and he moved his human hand up to one of her breasts, thumbing assuredly over the nipple, “oh James— you don’t think I’m letting you go, now?”

“I know too much,” he laughed, but there was strain behind it. 

“Damn right,” she said, and shuddered— “God, I might— oh, oh James, I’m—“ 

“Yeah,” he gritted out, “c’mon then,” and thrust up into her, harder and faster, and she braced herself at the perfect angle and spread her fingers across her clit, pushing but not rubbing, just so— 

She burst out with a string of utter gibberish in Russian, and he had his eyes squeezed shut and was biting his lip and she shoved herself down on him and shuddered through another orgasm. “James,” she moaned, “oh, James, oh—“ 

“Yeah,” he said, breathless, then groaned, shuddered, and bucked up beneath her, breathing going strangled as he came. 

She wrapped her arms around his head and kissed him, his mouth and his chin and his nose. “James,” she murmured. “James, I mean it, I am keeping you.”

He blinked hazily up at her, dopy and lethargic. “Yeah okay,” he said, and stroked her cheek with his metal fingers, pushing her hair away from her face. “I’m better as a team player anyway. Let you be the brains, I’ll be the backup.”

“Good,” she said, and kissed him. 

 

 

Epilogue:

 

Steve paced impatiently, settling and resettling his shield, checking his gloves over and over. Tony was playing on his phone, which was hilarious since he had to take off his gauntlet to do it. 

“You got any idea what Natasha was talking about?” he asked Sam, who was compulsively loading and unloading his machine pistols. 

“Naw,” Sam said, “no clue.”

“Barton knows,” Steve said, “I figured that much out.”

“Yeah but where’s the surprise in that,” Sam said. 

Tony’s body language had gone odd, and Steve watched him unobtrusively while he kept up his pacing. Tony knew something, he wasn’t just idly fidgeting on his phone. He was looking at something. Steve caught Sam’s eye and jerked his head at Tony, frowning as eloquently as he could manage. 

“I just want some kind of clue,” Steve said, and Sam read his mind and circled around to a better vantage point on Tony. Steve kept pacing, knowing Tony was absently keeping tabs on his whereabouts. Tony always knew where Steve was, always knew where Bruce was, and always knew where Pepper was. 

Sam frowned intently, trying to catch a glimpse of Tony’s phone, but in the suit Tony was too blocky for good sight lines. He made a face at Steve. 

Steve sighed inwardly, spun around, and said, “Tony, you got any insight into what we’re expecting?”

Tony glanced up, immediately caught sight of Sam in his peripheral vision, and frowned at Steve. “Whatever it is, it’s got trackers in it,” he said sourly. “And it’s enroute at about a human running pace. ETA maybe five minutes.”

“Whose trackers?” Steve asked. “You knew what frequency to scan for them, you must know whose they are.”

“Well, two,” Tony said. “One is Barton’s Starkphone. But not, I should mention, Natasha’s.”

“So Barton’s on his way here with— someone else,” Steve said, voice slowing in realization. He locked eyes with Sam, who was having the same realization. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, “your buddy the Winter Soldier, looks like. And… from the relative positions they’re either coming here together, or…”

“Or what?” Steve asked. 

“Or one of them is chasing the other,” Tony said. 

“Cap,” Maria Hill’s voice said over the comms, “we got a lot of movement in your neighborhood, looks like someone’s mobilizing a whole bunch of force to come at you.”

“I got it,” Tony said. 

“We’re talking— a lot of people,” Hill said. “No chatter, I don’t think they know you’re there. Just— a lot of people, on their way, pretty fast.”

“Either they’re all chasing Clint,” Tony said, “or—“

“They’re chasing Bucky,” Steve said. 

“It looks that way,” Hill said. 

And so they were ready when Clint came barreling into the courtyard below them, running flat-out like all the hounds of Hell were after him. But no one was behind him, no one was with him, and he scrambled madly up the wall. “Cap,” he yelled hoarsely, “Cap, get ready but stay hidden, we got like thirty seconds here.”

Steve ran to Clint’s location, staying low, and caught him by the shoulder. “Bucky,” he said, “where’s Bucky?”

“Natasha,” Clint panted, leaning against the wall, “with Natasha—“

Tony popped up next to them. “Trackers say he’s right behind you,” he said. 

Clint, improbably, grinned, and dug in his pocket for a second before producing— a plastic sandwich bag with a disgusting collection of slightly-bloody metal parts in it. “Trackers are right here,” he said. He handed the bag to Steve, who was staring in bafflement.

“What,” Steve said, horrified. 

“We cut ‘em out,” Clint said. “James volunteered for this, don’t look like that.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve said, recoiling belatedly, but he didn’t drop the bag. 

“Shit,” Tony said admiringly, “that’s fucked-up. Did Natasha do the surgery herself?”

“Naw,” Clint said, “she has a medic— here they come!”

Steve spun around, setting his jaw. “They think he’s here,” he realized. 

“That’s the idea,” Clint said with some satisfaction. “They think he’s here, don’t know you’re here, we kill ‘em all.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tony said. 

“After that,” Clint said, “I’m gettin’ on a quinjet to St. Petersburg and flushing these babies down a toilet. Let HYDRA spend a nice little while exploring the raw sewage in Neva Bay.”

“I like this plan,” Steve said. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first time participating in a bang-type fic challenge. It was a hoot, and working with my artist was incredibly exciting. I've never had anything illustrated before, in close to two decades of participation in fandom!   
> Unbetad, so all mistakes are my own; thanks for reading. <3
> 
> I, um, I might have a sequel in the works. I just, I feel like I should wrap up what happened with the Iron Man figurine. And the rest of the idea I had for the things Bucky carved in his arm. I swear I was going somewhere less-creepy with that. From his POV it made a lot more sense, I promise.   
> Anyway. Whether I write it or not, there was something to that. I promise.


End file.
